Book Club: Madonna in a Fur Coat

Professor Didem Uca will join the LBI Book Club to discuss Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali.

This best-selling Turkish classic of love and alienation in a changing world captures the vibrancy of interwar Berlin.
A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade and discover life in 1920s Berlin. There, amidst the city’s bustling streets, elegant museums, passionate politics, and infamous cabarets, a chance meeting with a beautiful half-Jewish artist transforms him forever. Caught between his desire for freedom from tradition and his yearning to belong, he struggles to hold on to the new life he has found with the woman he loves.

Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric, and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings, the relentless pull of family ties, and the unfathomable nature of the human soul. First published in 1943, this novel, with its quiet yet insistent defiance of social norms, has been topping best-seller lists in Turkey since 2013.

(Description: Penguin / Random House)

The Author: Sabahattin Ali

Sabahattin Ali was born in 1907 in the Ottoman town of Egridere (now Ardino in southern Bulgaria) and was killed on the Bulgarian border in 1948 as he attempted to leave Turkey. A teacher, writer, and journalist, he owned and edited a popular weekly newspaper called Marko Pasa and was imprisoned twice for his political views. In Turkey, he holds a position as one of the country's leading authors.

His short novel "Madonna in a Fur Coat" (1943) is considered one of the best novellas in Turkish literature. Translated versions have recently hit bestsellers lists and have sold a record number of copies in his country of birth. With this novel, Sabahattin Ali became one of 2 Turkish novelists whose works were published as Penguin Classics.

Our Guest: Didem Uca

Didem Uca is Assistant Professor of German Studies and associated faculty in the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. With a focus on intersectional approaches to post/migration cultures, Dr. Uca’s research has appeared in journals including Gegenwartsliteratur, Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German, Seminar, and Monatshefte, for which she wrote about how the protagonist of Irmgard Keun's novel Child of All Nations can be interpreted as an adaptation of the character of Mignon from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. As a literary translator from German and Turkish, her work has appeared in venues such as TRANSIT, Konturen, SAND Journal, and Turkish German Studies. A dedicated pedagogue, Dr. Uca's teaching has been honored with the Goethe-Institut/American Association of Teachers of German Certificate of Merit (2020) and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages German Special Interest Group's Early Career Award (2024)., was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.